You read that right, the Taliban.
How did we not understand this 100% crackpottery for what it was at the time?
Down is up, evil is good, enemy is friend.
Starting at about the 3:15 mark.
Tuesday, August 17, 2021
The Orwellian situation in Kabul right now began Feb 29, 2020 when Trump announced that the Taliban would be taking over the war on terror
The Afghanistan debacle is of Trump's design, but occurred only because Biden decided to implement it and withdrew the air cover necessary to the Afghan army's mission
William Maley, August 15, 2021:
The 2020 US-Taliban deal created deep and widespread apprehension about
what the future might hold. Then, it only took a few localised failures
to sap the confidence of all sorts of actors, both military and
civilian, in the survival of the government. Side-switching became a
rational strategy, then spun out of control.
The US troop withdrawal also seems to have reflected a failure on the part of Biden – although not the US military — to appreciate how destructive the February 2020 agreement had been to the effectiveness of the Afghan military.
In requiring the withdrawal not just of US troops but US maintenance contractors, it compromised the ongoing capabilities of key assets in the inventory of the Afghan National Army, as well as depriving the army of critical air cover.
As an insightful analysis put it,
in the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision, the US pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore.
William Maley, March 3, 2020
The text provides for a reduction of US troop numbers within 135 days to
8,600, to be followed by “withdrawal of all remaining forces from
Afghanistan within the remaining nine and a half (9.5) months.” It also
purports to bind not just the US but also its allies, including
Australia, even though they were not parties to the agreement; and it
includes “all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security
contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel.” ... the agreement is better seen as a “withdrawal agreement” than a “peace
agreement.” It is no wonder that the Taliban are painting it as a
victory.
We were all consumed with COVID-19 in February 2020, and completely ignored this.
People who say now that the rapid fall of Afghanistan would not have happened under a second Trump term don't know what they are talking about.
Trump designed this outcome, and Biden was only too happy to implement it.
Biden gets to say he ended the war, pleases the progressives on his left, and blames Trump for it, all at the same time.
And the GOP alone gets to be The Stupid Party yet once more, unless of course the thousands of Americans trapped in Kabul this morning because Biden failed to get them out ahead of time are not permitted to leave, or are taken hostage.
Their fate, and Biden's reputation, are in the Taliban's hands, and that, when all is said and done, is the Democrats' disgrace.
Monday, August 16, 2021
The rise and fall of America, in two images
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| Come and take it, Texas 1835 |
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| Come and take my ass, Kabul 2021 |
Sunday, August 15, 2021
Climate Update for KGRR: July 2021 was utterly normal
Climate Update for KGRR: July 2021 was utterly normal, UTTERLY I SAY!
Max T 89, Mean 94
Min T 53, Mean 49
Av T 72.3, Mean 72.3
Rain 4.44, Mean 3.15
Cooling Degree Days 236, Mean 242; CDD to date 505, Mean to date 426.
By average temperature, July 2021 was utterly normal, registering the mean. But to listen to the headlines, July 2021 was the hottest July ever globally. How then did Grand Rapids escape such abnormality by registering such utter normality? Should there not be some sign of temperature pressure in Grand Rapids from this horrible state of affairs all around us, as there was for example in 1936, the hottest July in the United States on record, or in 1901, the second hottest July?
It's all BS. Grand Rapids' hottest days are long behind us, as are the world's, as Tony Heller frequently demonstrates.
Grand Rapids' 11 hottest months of July by average temperature are overwhelmingly a thing of the past. 8 of the 11 instances, 73%, occurred from 1936 and earlier. Just three instances occurred in the post-war. The record breaking heat waves of 1936 and 1901 made themselves clearly felt in Grand Rapids, both years making the top five, while the so-called hottest July ever globally, July 2021, was a giant nothing burger for heat.
1921: 79.7 degrees F
2012: 79.2
1916: 78.7
1901: 78.1
1936: 77.3
2011: 77.0
1955: 76.9
1934: 76.8
1935: 76.5
1897: 76.3
1931: 75.8.
Saturday, August 14, 2021
My incompetent Michigan utility Consumers Energy can't deliver electricity for four days but thinks free ice cream will substitute for doing its job
How about not retiring generating capacity and having to buy power from other states?
How about concentrating on delivering energy from reliable sources instead of risking our future on tenuous green schemes?
How about hiring more workers to keep the gas and power flowing to the people who pay your salaries?
Coronavirus vaccines are just like Keynesianism
54% vaccination isn't enough just like spending 54% more to stimulate the economy isn't enough.
75% won't be enough. 100% won't be enough.
IT'S NEVER ENOUGH.
Both are religions. You can't disprove them because they've never really been tried.
Michigan is increasingly like a third world shit-hole: Day four without electrical power from Consumers Energy, over 81k still affected
My electric power went out Tuesday night at about 11pm.
It is still out.
Over 81,000 customers, just of Consumers Energy, remain without power four days after a line of storms came through.
The utility runs ads on the radio incessantly saying "Count on us"!
It spends more time and money trying to get consumers to curtail electric usage than it does providing it.
It decommissions coal fired generating capacity and then turns around and buys electricity from Indiana. Under Democrat Gretchen Whitmer we are increasingly like California.
The utility is a cruel joke, especially this week as humidity levels soared with the heat. Indoor temperatures at night above 80 degrees F make for miserable sleeping, when sleeping occurs at all.
The air is full of the sound of generators, day and night. Lines are long at gasoline stations where people wait to fill their cans to get them through another night.
Green energy isn't green, and the power company doesn't provide it, green or otherwise.
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Monday, August 9, 2021
Frank Meyer knew better but had it exactly backwards
Seen here:
The political questions are not unimportant, but they pale in comparison to the importance of the moral and religious aspect of our lives. As Frank Meyer put it in his book In Defense of Freedom, “in the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue.”
This is a defect of that poor thing, the libertarian mind, which compartmentalizes reality into aspects, repudiating, with the rest of modernity, the pre-Englightenment understanding that the moral realm is the only meaningful realm inhabited by humanity.
Perhaps the more important defect of this libertarian mind is viewing freedom as a means or instrumentality, rather than as a result of virtue.
In truth, freedom is a condition, a by-product, a sign. It is subsidiary and not the main show. You can't wrangle enough of it and produce virtue with it. That's putting the cart before the horse, as we used to say. In fact quite the opposite. An excess of freedom makes a monster, because men are first and foremost not angels. The excess of freedom in the United States is the precondition for its licentiousness, making it the world capital for obesity, indolence, drug abuse, empty celebrity, sexual perversion, immorality, violence, entertainment, self-loathing, and a host of other ills. Eventually such a people tyrannized by themselves will require an actual tyrant to rule them.
You will not have a good society without good people, as Meyer did recognize as parents in the 1960s gave up being good and expected "institutions" such as schools and churches to take over their responsibility to be so.
This failure of nerve already had the country firmly in its grip by Meyer's time. Today we see the same shirking phenomenon but now writ even larger, as we expect a Trump, a political party, the Conservative Movement Inc., the Federalist Society, the rule of law, the police, the courts, or constitutional parchment to fix what only the individual can fix.
Only you can fix what is wrong. You must, as Bill Buckley once famously said, "Cancel your own goddam subscription". You can. You must. Or it's over.
If you don't the woke will fix it for you. The current rage for and of "woke" is nothing if not a response of the young "nones" to this libertarian misunderstanding. Their chief enemy is freedom. The woke see all too clearly that American culture is incapable of saying No, which is the only true mark of the free man. Instead we think being free means saying Yes, to everything.
And if history is any guide, we'll say Yes to that, too, to the new tyranny of woke.
Sunday, August 8, 2021
The weekend help at KGRR ain't cuttin' it: They predicted 90 F, we made it to 86
Imagine being that far off about temperature predictions for a decade
from now, or for a century from now, and you get my meaning.
Coronavirus hospitalizations in the US have surged to levels similar to spring and summer 2020, Florida numbers now included
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| Color key: NY gray (for reference), CA blue, TX pink, FL green |
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| Michigan in orange had its turn in April |
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